[Las Vegas] Tarkett has grown dramatically over the past five years through a series of acquisitions, each with its unique strengths and cultures. Today, Jeff Fenwick, president and COO of Tarkett North America, is working to leverage those strengths while instilling in each the company’s core values.

“We have a wide diversity of cultures in our business,” said Fenwick who has been with the company for a little over a year now. “All of these businesses were small entrepreneurial businesses to one extent or another. We are going to embrace diversity and cultures but we are going to demand the same values. People have to value the customer first and foremost in everything they do,” he said.

Jeff Fenwick

Here at home, the Tarkett family includes Tarkett, Johnsonite, Centiva (purchased in November of 2010) and the recent acquisition of soft surface company Tandus (in September of 2012) and gives the company the ability to offer the A & D community hard and soft surface synergies.

Fenwick said that while Tarkett will keep the entrepreneurial spirit alive in the new acquisitions, they will all adhere to the company’s overall strategy of profitable growth. “We want to grow organically beyond what the economy is doing and we have to execute. Our strategies have been in place for a while — every month, every week, every day it’s execute, execute, execute. And making sure we are adding value to the customer,” he said.

Everything Tarkett does is centered on adding value to those it serves and is tied to its core principles of quality, reliability and safety, he said. The company’s iSelect (launched some 19 months ago) and Balanced Choice are perfect examples of the company’s philosophy of offering the customer — be it an architect or designer or a residential consumer — a choice of design first and then make it available across product platforms to meet different installation needs.

“We have a strategy that centers around growth and that’s tied directly to the investments we make related to iSelect on the residential side and Balanced Choice on the commercial side,” explained Fenwick. “We have strategies around operational excellence [as well].” Those strategies include a focus on world class manufacturing, high service level expectations and safety.
While the language may be different for residential than it is for commercial, the messaging is aligned with the company’s core principles.

“The messaging around the commercial side is called Balanced Choice — the interior design community, architectural community clearly understands what it is to be able to match from room to room regardless of the product. On the residential side, the language has to be different but the concept is the same. It’s about enabling the consumer to make a choice, give them back the power to make the choice based upon their design needs, or durability needs or other things like allergy and asthma certification,” Fenwick explained. “We try to listen to what’s important to that consumer — the commercial consumer or the residential consumer.”

Guided by five pillars
The glue that keeps all of the Tarkett-owned companies together is its five pillars. Here at Surfaces, they were visualized front and center in a big way — a large handbag, for example, stood for Accessories.

Explained Jeff Krejsa, vice president marketing, Tarkett, “We have five pillars to our business that are core to everything we do commercially and residentially.”
Coordination is the first pillar. That comes to life in the iSelect program and is a mandate that all products — be it Fiberfloor, LVT or laminate — “speak to each other,” Krejsa said. “That system is something easy to navigate.”

Continuity is next and Krejsa said that this is about starting with design first: “Everybody’s made that difficult. (With Specifi) you find the design you want and then find construction that is right for you,” he said.

Next comes personalization: “All of us expect more personalization and customization. A consumer can go to our website and we have a group of designers that will help them.”
Fourth is accessories. Explained Krejsa, “Accessories, from a commercial side, is the air that we breathe.” On consumer side, the idea is for independent dealers to capture consumers by offering a great experience and solutions that add value and help consumers “finish that space.”

Fifth is sustainability and something that has been part of the company’s DNA. Its commercial and residential products are even Allergy & Asthma certified in North America — they are the only flooring company here, to their knowledge, with that certification. The certification requires stringent testing and was born of the company’s larger sustainability focus — one effort across all products was to lower emissions from all its products to non-detectable levels as well as eliminating the use of phthalates in all its vinyl products.

Even with a strong set of values and a clear purpose, challenges continue to exist. Noted Fenwick, “How do we encourage people to be entrepreneurial and enable them to make decisions and to move quicker than everybody else? Because, in the end, speed is what’s going to win. And how do we force collaboration? I really believe that the currency of the new economy is innovation and what drives innovation is creativity and collaboration and you can’t have one without the other. How you communicate with each other — even our office environment the way it is — has to support collaboration.”